mLearning

I'm not the easiest person to convince about m-learning (with or without the hyphen or the capital L) - my commute can be measured in feet, I don't travel on business all that much, I don't like small devices with fiddly little buttons (you should see the size of my calculator) and I find background music distracting. This would not be a particularly good time for me to be a teenager.

On the other hand, I am not completely unaware of what is happening in the world around me and so I was interested to meet, in Boston, a true m-learning enthusiast in the shape of David Metcalf and to walk away with a free copy of his book, mLearning (HRD Press, 2006), one of the few available on the subject. At 156 pages this was a quick read and provided a useful overview of the state of m-learning circa 2005 (when the author concedes that it was written). I am not being critical here, because the book seems broadly current, but you have to sympathise with the author when the technology is changing so rapidly.

Inspired by my read, I summarised for myself how I thought m-learning would really be used in the short to medium term:

1. Performance support, i.e. reference, not learning, starting with the simplest media - text, recorded voice, live voice - and graduating, with 3G connectivity to include richer media in the form of still images, animations and video. I'd say mobile performance support will be just like its desktop equivalent, just smaller and simpler. It could be highly interactive, in the form of troubleshooting guides and expert systems, although most will probably be quite straightforward.
2. Delivery of passive learning materials, e.g. podcasts, videos, PDFs, Flash movies, web pages. Essentially these would be the same as you get on PCs, but ideally smaller/shorter.
3. Some form of interaction with content, in the form of assessments, cases, scanarios or simple games, using keypads, touch screens or voice recognition. These won't be much different to their desktop equivalents, but most likely in much smaller chunks and adapted, of course, to smaller screens and different interfaces.
4. Access to LMS functionality.
5. Participating in online collaborative activities using email, instant messaging, forums, blogs, teleconferencing, texting.

None of the above are peculiar to mobile learning. They are 'business as usual', allowing continuity across desktops, laptops and handhelds. I don't find this particularly disappointing, in fact quite the opposite - mobile learning provides access to performance support and learning activities for more people, more of the time.

David's book does suggest some exciting new possibilities, unique to the mobile world, including proximity detection, which allows you to connect with others who have similar interests who happen to be nearby - great for conferences. It's also possible that information related to objects that you are currently close to - say exhibits at museums - could be beamed to your palmtop. I'm sure there are many more possibilities that even David hasn't thought of - I just can't see them happening all that soon. In the meantime there are plenty of more routine applications that will be able to estabish a more clear-cut return on investment.